HMD's Bridge Project is proud to support choreographer Gerald Casel for a full year as Lead Artist in Dancing Around Race, the 2018 Community Engagement Residency. Description of Dancing Around Race by Casel:

My choreographic work complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. For this residency, I will be engaging with artists as co-interrogators to look closely at the role race plays in dance production and presentation. We will ask how our work as artists functions in society and how the communities we engage with are considered, internalized, and reflected through our work. Employing a 'systems thinking' approach, I hope to connect with sectors of the Bay Area dance ecology and beyond to engage in invigorated dialogue to better understand how all are interconnected. We will invite curators, critics, scholars, dance writers, grantors, collaborators, publicists, and audience members to come together to spark conversations around dance. We will address systems of support, power and privilege, race and colorblind racial ideology, issues and problems around diversity, resilience and sustainability, and more. Working with the premise that all sectors are interdependent, we will promote a culture of empathy so that every part of the dance community feels more visible, heard, and understood. Finally, we will identify issues that dancers, choreographers and their collaborators face and will try to create solutions to problems that may be attributed to misunderstandings, uninformed assumptions, and myths.

As part of Casel's residency, HMD will present two Community Engagements Forums that invite the public into this process.

Members of the artist cohort for Dancing Around Race are: Raissa Simpson, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Sammay Dizon, Yayoi Kambara and David Herrera.

Funding for the 2018 CER comes in part from the Center for Cultural Innovation's "Investing in Tomorrow" grant.